Biography

by Gonçalo Castro

6 January 2017

Imagine you lived in the Bronx in the late 70’s and you had a friend with a great record collection and some recording material. You loved rap and had already written some lines. You dropped by with another friend, who is a DJ in a club. Now let’s fast forward to 2014, to a neighbourhood in Porto. Serial opened the doors of his home studio to MC Berna and DJ Score. Pro’Seeds is the meeting of their passion for rap. The club doors are open, let’s meet the boys!

Serial is an old-school producer. He’s a member of Mind Da Gap, the oldest still active Portuguese hip-hop group, since 1993. He’s a “beataholic” with a magic ear for that special sample. MC Berna is around 10 years younger than Serial. He released his debut solo album in 2002 and never stopped rhyming. DJ Score is famous for being part of Gatos do Beko and is a skilled DJ who already scratched his way to several other artists’ songs, from pop singer Pedro Abrunhosa to rapper SP Deville.

We could call this a super rap group, but fact they’re actually an underground experience. Berna doesn’t rhymes about girls, parties or fast cars. Serial doesn’t use the same samples that Mike Will Made It does. He goes after those old soul vibes, delivering some very smooth loops. It’s not your regular “fast rap album”, it’s more a “fast fuck album”. Their songs are hard, with lyrics about being an outsider. In ‘Grunf’, Berna talks about growing up in the hood and getting “a head opened for not being next to the right guy”. He also tells the story of Quim, a friend raised by a prostitute in a family of thieves, who grew up selling coke. To fully understand the Pro’Seeds vibe, watch the video for their first single ‘Soft Power Sagrado’.

This is not gangsta rap, this is the real deal. And Berna isn’t alone on the Pro’Seeds album. Ace (Mind Da Gap), Expeao (Dealema) and Virtus join to depict a few scenes in this “noir” movie all about Porto, a grey town that probably became the Bronx of the hip-hop movement in Portugal.
But their tales could come from any big city in the world. If you live in the outskirts of Paris, London or Munich, it’s the same. But don’t be afraid. Pro’Seeds can shine some light onto this dark and twisted world.